Chrome Multitasking Mode

The first came to my attention is the “Chrome multitask mode” video in YouTube. In this video, the “Google employee” claims that you can use more than 1 mice at a time on the same screen. I don’t have two mice to test it, but I bet if you really try to follow these instructions, you get… nothing.

8-bit Google Maps

Is this April Fool? Or a permanent feature? I hope it is the latter one because it’s so funny. Today if you go to Google Maps, you will see a box telling you the 8-bit version is released.

You can find the 8-bit rendering of some landmarks.

UFO at Area 51:

And there are hidden monsters, like this:

People have been crazily sharing the landmarks and monsters they found, probably you already seen some on your Facebook, Twitter or Google+ statuses!

Google even released a video introducing 8-bit Google Maps like a serious product launch!

YouTube Collection

The final amazing product is YouTube Collection. You can order YouTube videos in DVDs delivered to your home! A vast variety of collections with different themes are available, check this out:

Today’s featured social web app is VHX, a place where you can discover and share video online. This web app features an easy-to-use interface that makes watching and sharing video on popular social sites and media sites extremely easy.

Online Video Sharing and Discovery Made Easy

So what is this VHX all about? First of all, it is a video watching portal. The web app brings you the popular video clips being shared by people on the internet. You can quite some channels such as movie trailers, BuzzFeed and Staff Picks chosen by VHX staff and watch instantly in the browser window.

But there is more about this web app. By linking your accounts on social platforms to VHX, i.e. Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, you can enjoy the video shared by your friends. So you don’t have to go here and there, just one web app to enjoy video on all platforms. It also has a Reddit channel that does not require your Reddit credentials.

A third source of finding video on VHX is by sharing. Users can add a bookmarklet in their browser to share any video found on a web site to VHX.

This web app is not only designed for instant watching. You can put video in your queue for watching later. And if you discovered any great stuff, simply click share to post it to Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr to invite your friends to view it.

Summary

I like the idea of VHX because it does not simply scrape popular video on the internet, just like the TwitTV I introduced before. The core idea of VHX is crowdsourcing and sharing. The web app itself does not need to monitor the video sharing trend on popular sites, it simply rely on its users and their friends. I particularly like the simple user interface of it. Tablet users should find it easy to navigate around.

Looks like Google is continuously bringing new features to Google+. We just reported about What’s Hot, Ripples and Creative Kit, now Google just announced some other small additions.

YouTube in Google+

You may now find a small YouTube tab on the right hand side of the Google+. If you hover your mouse cursor on it, a sidebar bar would slide out for you search for YouTube videos. It will bring up a new window showing video clips relevant to your search term.

So what’s the intention behind this new feature? Google said “we wanted to bring YouTube directly into Google+—as well as make it easier to watch and share your favorites“. Yes, while you can watch the video directly in the new pop-up window, you can also +1 it.

Besides, now when somebody shares a video with you, apart from watching the video, you can also open a related playlist directly from the post. And Google+ will start to add YouTube playlists in the search results of Google+ as well.

This may look strange in the first place but it’s understandable. People are more attracted to graphics and video, particularly video. I believe that the better integration of YouTube into Google+ is a move that Google makes to make users stay in Google+ and use it more. So as the recent addition of the image editing function. The more cool things people share, the more people use Google+.

New Google+ Extensions for Chrome

Google released two new extensions for Chrome for using Google+. The first one is a +1 extension that lets you +1 any web page, no matter the page has a +1 button built-in or not. The other one helps to you check Google+ notifications and enable Hangouts right from the extension.